Blog Revival

I allowed this blog to go dormant as I went through multiple life challenges. I'm back! I have become a full technology teacher in Houston, and I'm excited about sharing some of the amazing things I've been learning both about best teaching practices and the amazing tech tools that are available to students today. I will also include links to presentations and other tidbits you may find interesting.

HTML video

Students in my Webmastering class need to watch the video on html tags. Please click on this link to access the video.

Catching Up

I have discovered that I have too many blogs. Courtesy of some required courses and graduate work, I have ended up with a couple wikis and a couple of blogs. I am going to be consolidating here and will be posting links to the other sites for anyone interested.

In February I will be presenting at Texas Computer Educator's Association in Austin. My presentation will be about using technology with ESL students. In preparing for that presentation, I am discovering several tools that I feel could be useful to other teachers that I will also be sharing here.

One of the new tools that I have just discovered thanks to Richard Byrne and his Free Technology for Teachers site is Blubbr. This tool allows you to take 20 second clips from YouTube videos and compile them in a quiz. Simply select the segments that explain your topic, write the questions and post your quiz. I will be teaching beginning web students in the next semester, so I tried it out by making a short video/quiz on html tags. Check it out.


Or you can simply put a direct link to the quiz you create. It would take a little time to accumulate a variety of quizzes on various topics, but this could be quite useful for sharing information and getting immediate feedback for students.

As I get my presentation completed, I will likely be adding more resources. In the meantime, as promised, these are the links to my graduate school wiki that contains a variety of tools and resources explored including a link back to this site used in some of the assignments, and a link to a blog used for required professional development used in my district over the summer that includes a variety of useful tools.

Neverending Technology

   We are being strongly encouraged at school to use Twitter. I had been a hold out, not because I don't see the value in tweeting, but because of some serious time constraints lately. I did finally give in and sign up today. I can be found on Twitter at @TechGailD Join me there and we can tweet away.

LU-Teaching with Technology web conference 3/3/11

Tonight I sat in on the course web conference for my Teaching with Technology class. For the most part the web conferences are interesting and it is a good way for the online students to ask questions of the professor and clarify assignments. Tonight I did not comment, just followed the conversation. As the conference was ending it occurred to me that we all missed an opportunity to share some ideas about various activities involving technology that we are considering using to solve a particular scenario for the class assignment. While we talked about the lesson design and asked about how many activities to include, only one participant asked about any specific activity involving technology. This could have been an excellent opportunity for all of us to brainstorm some ideas and share some resource ideas, but I think we really missed a golden opportunity. We became trapped as our classroom students do in worrying about what was required to fulfill the assignment and not so much about what we could learn from each other.

Conflicting accounts

I have in the past used my school email account to access my blog account. Our school district now has a new partnership with Google and this blog has been switched over to my gmail account as accessing it through my district account is no longer possible. This appears to have caused some issues with people being able to access my posts. If you are encountering any issues, please post a comment so that I can work towards getting my blog back up and running smoothly.
While I understand the district's desire to maintain our professional accounts and to provide us linked services, this particular glitch in communication has caused multiple issues so far. As a requirement for my graduate course I am preparing with teammates a Google Document and a group project page. Since my computer defaults to the school district I can not even post a link without it resulting in anyone trying to use the link to view the project page being redirected to the school district access portal. I am hopeful that this is an issue that can be resolved in the future.

Reflection - LU EDLD5366 Digital Graphics and Animation

The course began with a lesson in basic design principles. While these were familiar to me and normally incorporated into the lessons I teach to my Journalism students, they were a good reminder and provided good concrete examples I could use with my students.  According to Yearwood (2009), “Repetition means using the same element or attribute in more than one place in the design.” Alignment is defined as, “the attribute of arranging every element in a design to conform to some kind of horizontal and vertical visual relationship with other elements in the design.” Looking over the examples provided of repetition and alignment provided useful tools to share with my students as they develop the school yearbook and need to create multiple layouts incorporating alignment and repetition to ensure consistency throughout the yearbook.

We designed a personal logo. This was an interesting challenge as there are so many different elements in my teaching career: an English as a Second Language department chair, a technology teacher, a music teacher, and a language arts teacher. Using the concepts of repetition and contrast I designed my personal logo as three rivers running between the letters of my name in various shades of blue and converging in the distance as my professional responsibilities do.  One of the most interesting parts of the assignment was gathering input from friends, family members and acquaintances to see what words emerged to describe me. The activity came from the LeaLea blog that was one of the assigned readings. While understanding the nature of graphic design, I had not previously considered the personal aspect that should be incorporated into a logo to make it meaningful.

The third week had us move into animation, a skill I had never attempted before. It was surprisingly easy to create an animation using Stykz. This skill will be useful to incorporate as I move into teaching webmastering in the next semester. My students will enjoy learning to use the basic animation tools and will likely go far beyond the sample I created for my project. Our readings on Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy gave a new outlook to the traditional taxonomy view and a framework for allowing us to more readily determine cognitive levels for the projects we use with students.

The newsletter assignment was a simple assignment for me as I have been producing newsletters for various organizations for a number of years.  Creating a digital newsletter using the design principles from the first week’s assignment allowed me to more readily produce a finished product for a local non-profit organization.

Each of the assignments in this course expanded on my previous knowledge and offered pieces that I can readily incorporate in my personal work as well as in the classes with my students. The discussion board and conversations helped me see things from other perspectives and expand my personal thinking. Because I learn best by using technology, the assignments worked well with my personal learning style and illustrated the importance of using the same type of approaches with my students, allowing them time to experiment with technologies and assignments to learn what works best for them. I would like to do further investigation into digital animation as I believe this will capture not only my own interest, but also that of my students. Animation offers possibilities for many subject areas and does not need to be complicated to illustrate key learning points.

Yearwood, J., (2009). Basic Design Principles. Retrieved from https://lamar.epiclms.net/Learn/Player.aspx?enrollmentid=1578712

Alcantra, L. (2005-2010).  The Art of Self-Branding Part One. Weblog post retrieved  from http://www.lealea.net/blog/comments/the-art-of-self-branding-part-one

Churches, A.  (2008). Bloom’s Taxonomy Blooms Digitally. From Tech & Learning.  Retrieved  from http://www.techlearning.com/article/8670

LU-Animation

My course assignment this week was to create a simple animation. This was something I had never tried before. It was not difficult to do, but it was fun. I used a program I had not seen before called Stykz. Hopefully my short animation will appear correctly below.

EDLD 5366 The Lisbon Bible

One of my graduate assignments was to review some ancient manuscripts and analyze them for the principles of graphic design. One of the first things I noticed about the Lisbon Bible is the use of repitition. The book is beautifully designed. The calligraphy is fantastic. The cover is repeated gold stars and a circular pattern. The interior pages have a variety of floral patterns around the text, but while the patterns themselves are different, their placement, general style, and borders are repetitive. Alignment is also important in this text as the columns are consistent in length and width throughout the pages. In most cases the top and bottom borders match and the width of the floral border around the text is the same. Contrast is achieved by use of different colors in the borders and border text on many of the pages. Proximity is achieved because each passage flows to the next with no effort. The larger colored text areas are centered within the text to allow the reader to examine them and move smoothly back to the text. The artist for this bible used the gold borders to constrain the text areas and give emphasis and importance to the text included inside. The use of the floral borders also seemed to indicate the importance of the text to the author.

EDLD 5365 Course Reflection

This course was titled Multimedia and Video Technology. I went into this course comfortable with the content due to my Broadcast Journalism background. I anticipated creating a video with a storyboard and editing it. This proved to be the case with the course. I felt my expectations and the course outcomes aligned very well. The course also included a few pieces I had not anticipated such as file compression issues and attempting to collaborate on a video without ever being in the same location as my partners.
These outcomes are very relevant to what I do in my daily work. As the Desktop Publishing teacher, I deal with students using all forms of media. Learning about other editing software available and working with files in other formats will help me guide my students.
The only outcome I feel I did not achieve was not being able to get a few shots I would have liked to have for our PSA video. This was complicated by the collaboration factor as we all strived to complete our back to school organization and beginning of teaching classes while finding time to work together on our class projects. I think the collaboration proved invaluable however as our ideas came together as we worked and each of us was able to pick up some of the load for the others as we each experienced some obstacles in our time.
I learned that I have a good understanding of the technical aspects of video production, but still need to master more of the html coding for things such as posting a Creative Commons license on my work. I need to be able to trust my partners to provide solid work because they never let me down.

Web Conference 9-19

I participated in a web conference with my professor and classmates on Sunday, September 19th. We have had many instances where the video and audio portions are not working correctly. In this particular web conference, I could see several of the participants, but was not able to hear any discussion. It appeared that the entire group was experiencing the same problem, possibly due to some weather issues. The conference was conducted on the chat feature of the program. As in most of our web conferences we focused on answering questions the students had about their assignments. I was surprised at some of the questions. Dr. Abernathy continued to remind students of the time limit and they kept asking if it was ok to go over by a few seconds. While I understand it is the first time many have attempted a task like this, I have worked in radio and television, so I understood the time limit to be a firm limit. It was good to see people collaborating and helping each other out.

PSA on Cyberbullying

As part of my coursework for my graduate class, I participated with a group of fellow students to produce a one minute Public Service Announcement on Cyberbullying.
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Stand Up to Cyberbullying by Janet Armstrong, Priscilla Summers, Charlotte Spencer, Gail Dunn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Our group began the creative process by each of us coming up with a topic and storyline idea. We discussed these through email and decided on cyberbullying. We each contributed a script idea and collaborated to use the best ideas of each. As I had the most experience with video, I prepared the initial shot list and my teammates completed the script. We discussed the availability of equipment and locations as we are spread over the state. We came up with an over all plan and assigned roles for each of us. We determined I should do the actual editing since I had some experience. The video was shot by one team member and the others contributed the voice overs and production documents. We decided on the web delivery format to be YouTube because it is a simple upload from iMovie. One member secured the copyright attribution for our video. We used no copyright material from other sources, so no attribution was necessary.
Our video could be improved by reshooting a few of the segments for clarity and having a more direct action statement. Overall, our team worked together and collaborated very well. Everyone was willing to do their part and tried very hard to make the video a success.

Video Editing with iMovie

This week I created a podcast on how to begin editing video using iMovie software.
Video Editing with iMovie

Creative Video Editing in iMovie by Gail Dunn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

While creating the podcast and sharing the link were easy tasks, waiting for the embed code to be created by the podcast host was a long process.

Video Editing Software

This week I looked at some video editing software. One of the programs, iMovie, I had used previously. The other program, Debug Mode's Wax, I had never seen before. I have found iMovie to be a fairly simple straightforward program that students tend to be able to operate with minimal confusion. Apple also offers an excellent video tutorial to explain the basic editing packages installed. There is a selection of themes with built in transitions and titles to make the overall package more professional in appearance. The other advantage to using an Apple software package on a Macbook or iMac computer is the compatibility of all the products. Aside from the standard royalty free music clips included in iMovie, a user can create their own soundtrack in GarageBand and import it directly to iMovie. Still photos can be added directly from iPhoto and the iTunes library is available as well (assuming all copyright laws are followed.) Overall, iMovie has enough bells and whistles to challenge an advanced student but is easy enough for a novice to produce a quality video clip.

The Wax software appeared to be a decent choice for a freeware product. It has a large number of effects which tend to fascinate students, but it is not as simple to operate as iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. One big advantage to the program is that it can function as a plug in to Adobe Premiere Elements which is the standard in many schools. It is not as graphic as the iMovie program. You do not see the segments as you roll over them with the mouse. The number of available effects is good and the variety of those effects is surprising in a free software. The user guide does a good job of explaining the program, but it takes a while to actually figure out how each of the elements work together.

Based on my previous experience with several video editing programs I feel this was an interesting learning experience, to see what is available for free use and be able to compare several of the programs side by side on the same video clips. Previously I have learned how to edit the video clips to make a movie and how to export those projects in .mov files for QuickTime and .MSWMM for Windows Movie Maker. I added exporting in .flv files through this course and learned new tricks to compress files. Through making the videos and podcasts this week I have learned that I should investigate a wider range of products in the future in order to accommodate multiple avenues of getting a project completed.

As Charlotte Spencer pointed out in her blog on this same subject, many times we need to be able to convert our videos from one format to another.  Her discussion included some packages I had not used before. For my own file conversion I used Zamzar.

Video production will continue to play a role in education for years to come. As a teacher, I will need to improve my skills on the more technical components and make sure I am able to use the developing technologies with students to improve their critical thinking, attention to detail, and abilities to handle new and improved technologies as they come along.

Spencer, Charlotte. (2010, Sept 4) Evaluating Video Editing Software. [Web log comment] Retrieved from: http://charlottecspencer.blogspot.com/ Sept. 5, 2010

Lamar - Web Conference

One of the assignments in my graduate course this week was to participate in a web conference. This is a great idea for technology education leadership students as we need to have some experience in how these web conferences work. We have had these conferences in our previous courses as well, but this week was an example in what not to do. We use Adobe Acrobat Connect to access these web conferences and normally ask questions to clarify our assignments, and learn of any upcoming events that will affect our program of studies. This week was not a successful web conference because the software appeared to be overloaded. First the few people with video on froze and then the entire video portion was lost and we resorted to just a typed chat conference.
Normally I participate in these conferences using my Macbook computer. I can normally speak, but have yet to learn why my working internal camera can not be turned on for the web conference. In some conferences there has been a button for me to allow access and in others there has not, but it has yet to actually show a picture.
This week's conference was not very successful probably because there were too many people trying to get online at the same time to ask their questions. It appears that after about 20 people the system slows down to a crawl or freezes entirely. The one good aspect is the chat. In the Adobe program, there is a chat to accompany the video. The chat allows us to comment to the entire group or privately to any of the participants. During the conference this week my partner and I were able to chat privately about our collaboration on an assignment and identify two others we would like to invite to participate in our group for our upcoming project.
While we were making those arrangements we were also able to have our questions answered by the professor and follow the questions of other students.
As we participate in more and more web conferences, I feel that each of us is becoming more relaxed using the conferencing program. We have learned some basics such as keeping our mics turned off when not speaking, ensuring adequate lighting for our cameras, and how to follow both the video and chat portions of the conferences.
I am not quite sure how I will use this process as a teacher, but I certainly see how useful it is to know how these conferences work. As the business world moves more and more into online conferencing to save on costs, it will become imperative for our students to understand the process in order to compete in the job market.

Thing 11.5

Thanks for another great summer of discovering tools on the Internet. For my colleagues who are not in Spring Branch ISD, check it out when you have the time. The first course is Library2Play, and the current one I just finished is Library2Play2. Both as well as the newest version Library2Play 3 can be found on the Spring Branch ISD Library Resources web page.

As for my favorite (or most likely to use) aspects of this round, I would have to go with the simple vocabulary tools from Thing 2 such as Wordle, Wordsift, and Voki as one of my favorites. Each of these tools could really help my ESL students master a confusing language. I will also be using the Screencast-o-Matic screen capture video tool very early on in the coming year to establish a collection of how to video clips for my students as they try to master several new programs. The last of my favorites surprised me, but is Second Life. I knew Second Life was out there and basically what it was, but I had no idea of the corporate and educational aspects already in use. I was surprised to find universities, NASA, NOAA, ISTE and many other organizations with sites that could benefit students. While I expect it will be the last one I incorporate (due to my needing some learning curve time), I think in the long run it will be the one with the most impact on students. This is the one "thing" that should probably turn into its own course with guidance through all the steps of getting started and locating the resources that would be beneficial to individual teachers.

I will take away new resources and a reminder that every time I think I'm "advanced" in using technology and resources with my students, there is always a lot more out there to learn and explore. I like the Library2Play format in that I am able to work on each item in my own time frame and from my own home or wherever I happen to be. This is definitely an experience where you will get as much from it as you put into it.

As I am currently pursuing a Master's degree in Educational Technology Leadership, this program has provided me with abundant resources I need to be familiar with and be able to share with teachers on my campus. It will be included as one of the activities I use to address each of the ISTE Technology Facilitator Standards.

The unexpected take-aways from this experience are the exposure to some programs I had not encountered before, and a level of comfort that my experimentation with technology for my students is not as novel as I had believed and in fact needs to push much further.

Thanks for the interesting ride.

Thing 11

I have been encouraging good digital citizenship with my students for years and while many of them can tell me the "right" answers to online safety questions, most admit they do not necessarily follow them. If I have to pick 5 things to share with them I think they would be:

1. THINK - Just as you might say things online to make yourself sound better, so does the person you are chatting with. Use your head before responding to anyone online.

2. GUARD YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION - Try a Google search of your own name and see just how much information is out there for anyone to see about you. Never post your real name, address or phone number.

3. STAY SAFE - Never agree to meet someone you met online. If your friend tells you they are a good friend of that person, ask them if they have met in person or just online. Most of the people you meet online are looking for friends and conversation, but you do not want to be the person to find the dangerous people out there who follow chat rooms looking for victims.

4. CHECK THE SOURCE - So many teens believe that if something is on the Internet, it must be true. I have my students evaluate the Save the Rennets website and then discuss it in class. Many of them never look at the About Us tab. Look for the nonsense in what you read and see if you can support that information from any other source.

5. EXPLORE - Try to locate different sources for information. Use them to back up what you know or think you know, prove statements from various web sites true or false, find new information or a better way to say/show something. It is easy to get into a rut on the Internet and just look at the same old places. With so much to choose from, expand your horizons and see what is out there. Remeber to cite your sources when you do find information you can use.

Thing 10

I spent way more time on exploring Second Life than I really had, but I kept wanting to find more. I did not really interact with anyone while there, but I did jump around to several different islands. The first one I chose totally at random, decided I did not appreciate the language and moved on. I found the ISTE island and spent a while exploring that and then moved on to some of the museums just to see what it was like. After I explored and fumbled around a bit on my own, I viewed the SciLands Classroom and found it very helpful. Watching the video clip of all the educational sites already available got me to thinking of the possible uses for my students. I'm a little bit cautious due to the number of inappropriate sites available as well, but I think many of the sites listed in the SciLands video would be great motivators for the students. I saw a virtual Alamo, health sites, architecture sites, space sites, and many more. If a teacher has the time to locate specific worlds and can guide students through there, I think it could be a very powerful motivator to get students to have interaction with their course material in a manner they are familiar with and enjoy. Having students "build" a set for a book they are reading, or using the visualize math tools to create their word problems in the virtual world could really help improve comprehension. It could also be fun to use the projector on the teacher computer and let the class decide which of several preselected islands to visit, or where to go once you arrived. That would provide more control for the teacher. This "Thing" will definitely warrant more investigation.

Thing 9

I think Slideshare and the other sites listed for sharing PowerPoint presentations are excellent for students (as well as teachers.) I had stumbled onto Slideshare a couple of months ago when I desperately needed to post a PowerPoint slide show to my blog for a class I was taking. After repeated failures, I discovered Slideshare, uploaded my presentation and was ready to share within minutes. I think this is a valuable tool for students. As time is more and more occupied with responsibilities and activities, there is little time to sit at a computer and create a slide show and then plan to share it with a class. This technology allows us the freedom to work on a presentation/project when and where it is convenient and then upload it for sharing, whether that be for a grade if a student, for explanation and coaching by a teacher, or just for easy access if making a presentation. Not only would the creator get practice using newer generation computing without having to store everything on their personal computer or flash drive, they would also have the advantage of needing only an Internet connection to retrieve their information.

Thing 8

I've been looking for a good screencasting application. There are lots of things I would prefer my students be able to view at the computer and then immediately try. This is especially true for my Journalism/Desktop Publishing classes. By the time I walk them through a complicated program like PhotoShop Elements and they get to a computer to try it, they forget where to go. Using a screencast in short increments would allow them to have 2 open windows, view the instructions and immediately try them out. My sample screencast was made on Screen-O-Matic and I created a short video on how to open Photoshop and convert a photo from color to black and white.